If it be asked how nine can occur twice in twelve, the answer is, that the arithmetical impossibility is conquered or obviated by omitting the first three numbers, beginning with four and ending with the perfect nine. Nine being esteemed the perfect number, noon and midnight are both called “nine o’clock,” the one of the day, the other of the night while sunrise and sunsets are respectively “six o’clock” of the day and “six o’clock” of the night.
We shall attempt to explain this abstruse and original system. Philipp Franz von Siebold, one of the early scholars on Japan, writes:Īgain, the numbering of the hours, which seems so straightforward a matter for people who can count to twelve, is in Japan so strangely complicated, that, had not the expedient been adopted of bestowing upon each hour the name of a sign of the zodiac in addition to its number, it would be not easy task to answer there the seemingly plain question of “What’s o’clock?” In Manners and Customs of the Japanese in the Nineteenth Century (Rutland and Tokyo: Tuttle 1985-a re-print of the 1841 New York English edition), Dr. Anyway it is said that kokonotsu-doki (ninth hour) was twelve midnight. Some sources say they got it from the Portuguese. Later the Japanese developed a clock that seemed to run backwards. These twelve hours were named after the names of the Chinese zodiac, with the Hour of the Rat being the two hours or so around midnight. The length of each of these “hours” however kept changing according to the seasons. Six units divided up the day and six more divided up the night. Now in the classical Japanese system of time measurement there were twelve periods or “hours” in the day. Both are called tokei, literally “time-measurer.” There is no distinction either (even today) between clocks or watches. There is no distinction between singular and plural in Japanese so we don’t know, yet, how many timepieces he is talking about. And here we begin the process of trying to find out what the poem means. Its title is “ Tokei” (timepiece, clock or watch). He expressed grief over troop losses in verse.īut this is one of his “newfangled thing” poems. He wrote tanka about his first exposure to telescopes, photography, trains, steamships, telegraphs, and then too Western-style wars. Oh, he did write a lot of awful mini-“State of the Union” messages, but I like his personal poetry and his poems about new inventions coming into Japan. The poetry of this Emperor has delighted me for years.
His poem is a tanka by the Emperor Meiji, 122nd Emperor of Japan, who reigned from 1868 to 1912, when Japan began its modern explosion towards the modern world.
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